LED test / review – Lumileds Luxeon MZ 5700 K min. 90 CRI (3V) – Finally! High CRI, High power, beautiful light

Inspired by this test I wanted to check that 5700K high CRI XHP50.2 so I swapped it into a KDIY KF8 (it had a boring 5000K XHP50.2).

And I’m not disappointed (tint is not horribly green, pretty white but more blue and green than red, and wood tones look not as yellow as with 70 CRI leds of same colour temperature), but I am also not super-impressed (219B 5700K 92CRI has a bit nicer tint, and being a new Cree, it has some ok not too annoying yellowish corona around the hotspot). The OTF output is about 1600 lumen (pretty constant, the KD boost driver regulates quite well).

Looks nice, thanks for the tip.
Is this board also available in 20 mm size? My test setup doesn’t allow the use of these little 16mm boards.

@djozz: could you make some whitewall shots and maybe a little comparison to Nichia 219BT-V1 sw57? This LED sounds interesting but I have always doubt about light quality and beam pattern because it’s a new generation Cree emitter. I tested the XP-G3 5700 K min 90 CRI already and the tint was ugly green with the known discolored corona…

I'll have 16mm and 20mm DTP boards soon. When I was designing first batch of 4040 16mm pcbs, this is actaully LED I had in my mind, Luxeon V is released later,but conveniently has same footprint.

I have few of these LEDs in my parts for almost THREE years!, that is how old is this LED, and still in 2018 it is brightest 3V LED (except very large luminus LEDs who don't fit in most flashlights).

I did some tests with this least ~6months ago, and lumen/voltage curves are very similar. Cross size in reality doesn't look that bad,gap is smaller than XHP-50/70 but bigger than XHP-50.2/70.2.

With medium roughness orange peel reflectors (tried OP C8 reflector) cross/hole is not visible.

In don't think people realize how good this LED is, it's a basically dedomed XHP-50 with 3V drive and lowest Vf of any 3V LED - regulated high mode would be available for a long time with linear drivers with decent overall efficiency ~85%, this would be similar like having 6V LED+7A output boost converter, but at lower cost.

BTW 5000K 70CRI variant is available in T flux bin (full reel), which is about 30% higher that LED tested above, I calculated ~3500+lm at 14-15A is possible (I'm considering to buy 1 reel for some time).

Some triples and quads can have higher lumens/efficiency, but even with mild OP reflector, this LED should have much better throw.

Has anyone stuck triple or quad Carclo optics in front of some of these? I think that’s what I would be most interested in. Neven, are you planning on selling these LEDs on your MCPCBs? I’d be interested in trying out a quad with them.

Quad quad :smiley:

Now that’s interesting. It would have the surface luminosity of about XHP35 HI E2 with much higher output. And be available in 3/6V.

The quad array is wide, wider than a XP-L Hi, which already looks less nice through these optics than XP-G or even better XP-E. On top of that, the middle part of a TIR is a plain lens, so on top of a donut you may even see a vague cross :smiley:

Im my suppose leds will flow so much light away tirs enter that light will burn the optics very fast.

I looked on the carclo website and it seems the led has been tested with the common 10mm optics. It doesn’t work well with the tighter optics but on the 10508 it seems to make a good beam with decent efficiency. I guess three or four of these combined under a medium spot optic would make for an extremely efficient high cri flooder. link

Well, speculation is all fine, and you all know what your talking about… But I wonder if someone has actually done it. If not I’d be happy to give it a go.

Aha, cool. Thanks for posting. I see that the 10623 is the quad equivalent. I understand that most would want these LEDs for throw, but I’m more interested in the high CRI and output combination.

Interestingly, 10508 offers tighter beam and higher cd than 10507. Still extremely floody though.

There is no sense to put these in small triples/quads, first emitting surface is larger than tir holes, which would probably cause optics melting at high power, second Luxeon V has similar output up to ~8-9Amps(and is 2x cheaper), this LED is better than Luxeon V only if you want to drive it at 9+ Amps. Mz can be considered as approx.two undomed Lux Vs in parallel. It's available in 3/6/12V.

DTP boards should arrive in 2weeks, I have one 3V 5000K 80CRI and two 3V 5700K 90CRI LEDs for testing, I'll try to put one in M1 host to see how beam and output looks. If there is enough interest I'll maybe buy one T-bin 5000K 70CRI reel. 3V 5700K 90CRI is available at mouser (unknown bin as usual with large distributors).

Yeah, I guess they are pretty big… but I still got me some ideas :smiling_imp:

BTW, looking at Lumileds website I just saw Luxeon F Plus:
https://www.lumileds.com/products/automotive-lighting/luxeon-f

Looks like it could potentially beat the Blackie…

  • much lower thermal resistance
  • more efficient
  • individual bins are orderable
  • similar die size

ADDED: There’s alu DTP SinkPad for that: http://www.sinkpad.com/inner-product.php?id=31

And not to forget, Osram has announced the Oslon Compact PL series, which does exactly the same, with very smilar footprint.

The thermal pad of the Luxeon F is tiny though. Also, the Luxeon Z ES doesn’t get quite as high as other LEDs with a 2mm^2 die. In my eyes it would be surprising if this LED surpasses the Black Flat HWQP.

This LED looks like a great way to get a lot of light from a single cell light. I did not know about it. I guess the non standard footprint has kept it from seeing more use by flashlight modders.

Nice LED for pebbled TIR optics. :+1:

The use of XP boards is possible, though. I’m own a flashlight with the MZ already.

But this LED was called ‘power hungry’ to get 2800 lumens of high CRI light, which is true in some point.

Because that there are not much boost driver or compact modding hosts for multi battery use out there the needed amperage is a problem indeed because the current is way too high which ‘traditional’ drivers for single battery can handle. In my JAXMAN M8 the Luxeon MZ is powered by the A17DD_L and the FET gets really! hot at Turbo (approx. 13 Amps with more than 100 deg C on FET!) which should lowers it’s lifetime rapidly.

For building a triple I would recommend the 12 V variant of the MZ (LMZ9-SW57) and a hypothetical high power buck/boost driver with 4S battery config. Because of the needed diffusor or matte optic bigger reflectors of the also bigger host would also increase the throw.